Pathways to the PhD in Australia: A symposium

Nature, 2020

London now shuns journal-based metrics in staff assessment; it relies more on peer judgement of research quality. At Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, all staff sign the university's code of good governance, agreeing to uphold integrity, impartiality and social responsibility, for example. These are just three of dozens of efforts we found when investigating how institutions worldwide are working to improve research integrity. They form part of our long-term study on this topic, a project that is funded by the European Commission (see Table S2 in Supplementary information for more examples).

DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology

Universities and higher educational institutions, in the country or across the globe create new knowledge through their study of the existing ecosystems along with the constraints and challenges that lie therein. The most crucial tool in the box towards solving these gaping issues happens to be academic research. The knowledge generated at these epicentres address the problems, related to health, climate change, sustainability among many others. The findings of the research offer substantial breakthroughs to enhance the living standards of the people, better utilization of the limited resources and preservation of the planet. With the changing and ever-growing role of the institutions of higher learning and universities in particular research has become all the more crucial. There is hardly any domain where universities and the scholars don’t have a role to play. With spectacularly arrayed disciplines coming under the ambit of education, the researchers have a ringside view of the w...

Australian Universities Review, 2012

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is designed to provide a comprehensive review of the quality of research undertaken in Australian higher education institutions at regular intervals. The first ERA was conducted in 2010 (Australian Research Council, 2011a), the second will be conducted in 2012 and the third is planned for 2016. ERA was a successor to the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (DEST, 2005); an initiative prompted by political scepticism about the claims/assertions that universities made about the value of and returns on national investment in research. In implementing ERA, Australia follows several other countries, including the United Kingdom

2019

This is the 4th document of the series, devoted to the experiences related to research ethics and integrity. Its aim is helping GRACE partners reflect on possible GAs to develop in this area during the project implementation period or in the framework of the 8-year Roadmap towards RRI. The document includes five sections, respectively devoted to: Promoting research integrity−Integrating ethics into all phases of the R&I process−Facilitating structures for reflection Training Governance structures and policies for ethics and research integrity.

Truth, trust and integrity are essential to research at higher education institutions. These institutions have accordingly adopted several policies to foster research integrity. This article explores the likelihood that relevant policies at a selected institution of higher education foster research integrity. The qualitative, single exploratory case study commences with a review of scholarly literature and results in a conceptual model used for a directed content analysis of relevant institutional policies. The findings indicate that these policies do complement each other in fostering research integrity. Further research will be necessary to establish whether policies indeed contribute to responsible researcher conduct.

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations.

Accountability in Research, 2017

Research integrity emerged as an important matter of public concern in the U.S. in the 1980s, when Al Gore Jr., Ted Weiss, and John Dingle led Congressional hearings on fraud and conflict of interest in federally-funded biomedical research (Price 2013). After these hearing concluded, Nature published a short article on research integrity , and the University of Maryland at Baltimore held a two-day conference on research integrity, which led to the launching of this journal (Shamoo 1989a). Congress also passed legislation requiring the Public Health Service (PHS), which funds National Institutes of Health (NIH) research, to develop misconduct and conflict of interest regulations (Price 2013). By the end of the decade, the PHS had decided to require graduate students and trainees supported by its funds to receive education in responsible conduct of research (RCR). The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAESM)has played an important role in promoting the responsible conduct of research (RCR) since the late 1980s. NASEM reports have made significant contributions toour understanding of research integrity and the strategies thatscientists, academic leaders, and policymakers can use to promote ethical attitudes, decision-making, and behavior in research (NASEM 1992(NASEM , 2002)). NASEM reports have provided valuable insights into various RCR topics, such as: defining and investigating misconduct; protecting whistleblowers; questionable research practices; education and mentoring in RCR;RCR research;the ethics of authorship, publication, and peer review; sharing data and materials; and the role of academic leaders, journals, government agencies, and professional societies in promoting research integrity. The NAESM's guidebook, On Being a Scientist, which was first published in 1989 and has been revised twice since then, continues to provide useful guidance to science students and trainees concerning the ethical norms of research and how to apply them to real-world situations (NASEM 2009). Given the NASEM's outstanding record of advancing the cause of RCR, its latest effort, Fostering Research Integrity (2017), comes as somewhat of a disappointment.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

The widespread problems with scientific fraud, questionable research practices, and the reliability of scientific results have led to an increased focus on research integrity (RI). International organisations and networks have been established, declarations have been issued, and codes of conducts have been formed. The abstract principles of these documents are now also being translated into concrete topic areas that Research Performing organisations (RPOs) and Research Funding organisations (RFOs) should focus on. However, so far, we know very little about disciplinary differences in the need for RI support from RPOs and RFOs. The paper attempts to fill this knowledge gap. It reports on a comprehensive focus group study with 30 focus group interviews carried out in eight different countries across Europe focusing on the following research question: “Which RI topics would researchers and stakeholders from the four main areas of research (humanities, social science, natural science in...

CEPS Journal, 2023

Teaching Research Integrity Contemporary research is extremely competitive and the pressure to "publish or perish" is high, especially among young researchers. As a result, the risk of sloppy science and scientific misconduct is increasing. While it is difficult to precisely determine the scale on which scientific misconduct occurs, we can see, for example, that the number of retractions of papers from journals is increasing. There is therefore an urgent need to educate young researchers in responsible research practices and make them "streetwise" with regard to the topics they will encounter in their research. The increasing international cooperation between universities underscores this urgency. It is now widely accepted that most questions in daily research practices belong to a grey area (questionable research practices-QRP) in which the right or wrong nature of decisions and conduct is not always immediately clear, as opposed to the clear-cut cases of FFP (falsification, fabrication and plagiarism) that we find in the media. Moreover, the concept of Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) focuses on what is needed in order for students and scientists to learn to recognise problematic situations, to discuss these situations with their peers, and to devise strategies for dealing with them. The impetus for the focus issue was the 'Integrity' project, which ran from 1 October 2018 to 31 August 2021 under the Erasmus+ programme (project number: 2018-1-NL01-KA203-038900). 1 In addition, colleagues from two other projects on academic and research integrity were invited to report on their research findings: the 'Integrity' project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 824586, 2 and the project 'Strengthening Academic Integrity-An Interdisciplinary Research-Based Approach to Ethical Behaviour in Higher Education' , funded by the Ministry of Science of Montenegro. 3 Thus, the articles presented in the focus issue report on research findings from three international projects that address issues of integrity in research education. The second and fifth articles report on research conducted within the Erasmus+ Integrity project, the fourth article relates to the H2020 Integrity project, and the first, third and sixth articles report on the results of the 'Strengthening Academic Integrity' project. The last, seventh article in the focus issue is not related to the aforementioned

In this position paper several observations on the current status quo of training and teaching in research integrity (RI) are being made. This leads to seven statements on what the challenges to training RI, rather preferred to be conceived as training in responsible conduct of research (RCR) and what is needed to meet these challenges.

Universities and other research institutions are increasingly providing additional training in research integrity (RI) in an attempt to improve the quality and reliability of research. Various training courses have been developed, with diverse learning goals and content. Despite the importance of training that focuses on moral character and professional virtues, there remains a lack of training taking a virtue ethics approach to teaching research integrity. To address this, we, a European Commission funded consortium, have designed a train-the-trainer (TtT) programme for research integrity. The programme is guided by the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of 1) virtue ethics, 2) ethos of science, 3) learning by doing, and 4) learner-centred teaching. The programme follows a blended learning approach, combining online modules with group sessions using participatory exercises. Trainers are taught how to guide researchers through a series of structured exercises for fostering reflec...

SSRN Electronic Journal

The recent public policy trend emphasising markets and economic logic among public sector institutions, including universities, has led to the introduction of greater managerialism and formal demonstrations of efficiency and effectiveness. Such moves require a definition of inputs, outputs and outcomes as a means to rendering these activities visible and measurable.In Australian universities, recent changes to higher education policy (particularly research and science policy) have tightened control by Federal Government over academic professional activities and increased the drive to render professional activities calculable (simple, standardized) for the allocation of scarce resources. This paper focuses on the narrowing of definitions in two particular areas, namely, research publication and the funding of postgraduate research degree completions. The paper argues that such policy strategies reinforce selectivity of styles of research, types of research problems undertaken, and fa...